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Yoplait sales have fallen by 22% as the brand’s popularity continues to diminish. I have to point out that I hate Yoplait. I dislike pretty much everything about it; the flavor, texture, smell, everything. But then I feel the same way about almost all of the big name brand yogurts. The stuff is mostly inedible, and if you read the list of ingredients on some of these brands you’ll see why.

Drought in Spain

Spain has been having some serious drought issues this year which has been wrecking havoc with it’s farmers. The country has lost almost more than a quarter of it’s soft wheat production this year because of the weather and will probably have to import 40% more wheat than last year. There have been significant losses to the corn and barley crops as well.

The Guadalquivir delta, the Spain’s biggest rice producing area, is having serious problems with it’s water supplies. The aquifer from which water is pumped to irrigate crops is almost completely depleted, with only about 20% of the aquifer remaining, largely because of unregulated and illegal wells being drilled apparently by strawberry growers. There are reports of farmers renting drilling rigs and dragging them out in the middle of the night to or on holidays to drill wells without permits. There are an estimated 10,000 illegal wells in the area. They’ve even built their own reservoirs hidden in the forests in the area to store water they’ve been pumping illegally.

The aquifer is not being replenished because of the drought and increasing temperatures. The river itself is becoming increasingly salty as sea water creeps up into the river. Within a very short time they will have pumped the aquifer dry and put themselves entirely out of business by going after short term profits now and sacrificing the long term existence of their businesses.

China and Pork

The demand for pork in China is showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon. The country just started it’s first government approved pork pricing index on their commodities exchange to try to help stabilize prices. The pork supply in China is still dominated by small farms that are sensitive to price swings. As the market fluctuated, pork farmers would react accordingly, cutting way back in production during times of low prices and causing a subsequent wild upsurge in prices during the subsequent shortage of pork. Gee, sounds bit like the US milk market, doesn’t it?

The index could also be leading up to the introduction of futures and options contracts which could help stabilize prices as well.

The country is also trying to end urban pig production to get the animals away from waterways and densely populated areas to reduce pollution, the spread of disease, etc. There have been bans on pig production in cities and towns being put in place by local authorities all over the place.

At the moment, no effect at all, really, because China won’t accept the hormone and drug laced meat that most commercial growers are dumping on the US consumers. Virtually none of the commercially produced beef in this country meets Chinese health and safety standards. The beef now being exported to China is basically just PR fluff so politicians can pose for pictures with thick steaks in Beijing while pretending they actually did something.

The Chinese market is potentially huge, but it’s going to require ranchers to grow cattle from birth without the use of the hormones and drugs they’ve been using for decades. It will be interesting to see what happens here and if US growers can adapt to the market.

Walmart Goes Angus?

Walmart is facing extreme competition from places like Aldi, Save-a-Lot and newcomer Lidl in the cut price grocery business, and it’s sales have been flat or even shrinking, so the store is trying to improve its image by claiming that all of it’s beef is now “certified Angus“. The store apparently made some kind of deal with Cargill an Tyson to get Angus steaks and roasts at the same price as whatever it was they used to sell before. They’re doing it only for steaks and roasts and not ground beef products.

Walmart might be better served by looking at the quality of it’s stores and it’s whole “shopping experience” than by trying to put yet another marketing scam in place. From unstocked shelves to dirty floors, to untrained employees, to failing to staff the checkouts lanes, to, well, you get the idea. At least three times in the past year I’ve been in one of the local stores to find entire categories of product just — just gone. One day it was sugar. There was literally not a single container of sugar on the shelves. Anther time it was iodized salt. Again, not a single container of iodized salt. Another time it was white flour…

Milk Price Insanity: Nobody Knows What’s Going On

Watching the various agricultural media outlets is utterly infuriating some days. On the very same day, in the very same ag news outlet, I found these two stories:

Oh for heaven’s sake… trying to figure out what’s actually happening is enough to make one bang one’s head against the nearest wall.

One article claims milk prices are going up, another, often in the exact same news outlet, claims they’re going down. Another claims the future is utterly horrible, another claims the future is bright and sunny…

Does anyone really know what the hell is going on?

Wisconsin Is Cheese

Well, okay, so it isn’t made of cheese, but some days it seems like it around here. Still, Wisconsin is one of the largest producers of cheese in the world, and home to some of the biggest cheese related companies in the world.

The little town of Plymouth, Wisconsin, about 20 minutes from here, apparently handles 15% of all of the cheese produced in the entire country. It’s the home of Sargento, one of the biggest cheese processors in the country. Satori is big, and some privately owned companies like Masters Gallery Foods, all have locations in Plymouth that process, package and warehouse cheese products.

These few companies are a Big Deal around here, employing thousands of people at processing and shipping facilities scattered all over this area. Sargento just put in a huge addition here in the town where I live and there is talk that they’re going to expand the facility again in the next few years. Sargento alone employs over 1,000 people in just Plymouth and hundreds more here in Hilbert.

There Are Consequences When You Piss People Off

Mexico is no longer the largest buyer of US corn. It has spent about $1 billion less when compared to last year. The country is actively talking with Argentina and Brazil to buy corn. Mexico is becoming very nervous about the horrible comments that have been made by this administration about the country and it’s people, and is no longer looking at the US as a reliable trading partner.

You can’t blame Mexico, really. Having your citizens branded as murders, rapists and drug dealers as this administration has done isn’t exactly what you could call a ‘friendly gesture’, now is it?

EPA Approves Chlorpyrifos, Gets Sued

The EPA, against the advice of almost everyone (except the manufacturer), approved the continued use of a rather nasty insecticide, chlorpyrifos. If you click the word over there to get to the Wikipedia link, you’ll find this is nasty, nasty stuff, causing developmental problems in children, muscle weakness, seizures, coma, vomiting, paralysis, and suffocation from lung failure. Exposure to it is especially bad for children, causing low birth weight and extensive neurological problems.

Like I said, it’s nasty stuff. The EPA was on track to issue an outright ban on it’s use because of the scientific data it had developed in November of last year.

But then we had an election and, well, now Pruitt says no, it isn’t bad, and the decision to continue to permit it was based on “meaningful data and meaningful science.”

And it then refuses to give Associated Press copies of the scientific studies Pruitt claims that determined it is safe.

Editorial Comment: This kind of thing absolutely infuriates me. Study after study that I’ve turned up indicates chlorpyrifos is dangerous at even very low exposure levels, especially to children. Then Pruitt and the “new” EPA come along and claim they have studies that indicate it’s safe, and won’t tell anyone what those studies are, who did the studies, where the data came from, nothing…

Hundreds of farmers in both class action lawsuits and individual suits, along with Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Cargill are suing Syngenta, claiming that the company misled them into believing that it’s GM corn was accepted for import by China when it wasn’t. They claim that the company cost them billions of dollars in lost sales and shipping fees and caused corn prices to plummet.

One trial just ended last week, and Syngenta lost. It was ordered to pay $217.7 million to Kansas farmers. It’s not over yet. Syngenta is going to appeal, of course, so this Kansas suit could drag on for years yet. And this is just the start. Lawsuits involving 350,000 corn growers plus ADM And Cargill have yet to go to trial. Another suit is scheduled to start in Minnesota in August for more than $600 million. Cargill’s suit is supposed to start next year, and another one is coming up in Louisiana yet this year.

Still More Dicamba News

It isn’t just Arkansas with reports of dicamba drift causing crop damage. Now Tennessee has been hit with problems as well. As of June 26 there have been 27 reports of crop damage caused by dicamba drift. Not many compared with Arkansas, but Tennessee doesn’t get its crops in the ground as early as Arkansas does so it’s still relatively early in that state. No one seems to know yet if this is a problem with the herbicide blend itself or if it is a problem with the application techniques and equipment. Monsanto, of course, is claiming that either A) no such thing is happening at all, B) the product wasn’t used in accordance with proper application techniques, or C) insert your favorite excuse here. I don’t know, maybe fairies are killing off hundreds of acres of beans.

German Grocery Invasion

The Germans are coming. Lidl, the no frills German grocery store chain, is coming to the US. They’re planning on opening 500 new stores over the next five years. They’ve opened 10 new stores in the Carolinas and Virginia. The store is similar to Aldi’s model; no frills, very limited selection of product, lots of private label products at cheap prices, no shelves, just boxes of product stacked up.

Will it survive? My best guess is that they’re going to have a rough time of it. Most of the areas where they want to put stores are already more than saturated with grocery stores, and the chain has little to distinguish it from the other no-frills outfits like Aldi and Save-a-Lot. And it’s going to have a difficult time competing against Walmart which has fairly good prices and much better selection of product.

I have two major problems whenever I go to one of these places. The first is that if you really watch what the prices are, they generally aren’t all that cheap when compared to other stores. If you average out the overall cost of all the products, except for a few loss-leader items you aren’t really saving all that much money. The second is that the quality of the store brand products often isn’t all that good.

Beef Exports to China Begin

Well, sort of. A packing company sold a whopping 40 boxes of ribeyes and other steaks to somebody in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. And I suspect most of those were eaten by US politicians for photo ops where they were trying to take credit for China announcing it was going to start buying US beef.

There are, of course, some problems. One of the biggest being that the vast majority of beef raised commercially in the US doesn’t meet Chinese health and safety standards. China bans the use of growth promoting drugs and hormones, feed additives, antibiotics and artificial growth promoting tricks US growers use. As the Farm Bureau pointed out, “only a small proportion of commercial beef production would fit the current parameters”. Commercial growers who want to get in on the market are probably going to have to start from scratch, raising cattle from birth to meet Chinese standards. As of right now, it’s going to cost growers more to meet the stringent health and safety requirements than it’s worth for most of them.

The articles I’ve seen on this subject all seem to also ignore the fact that the primary reason China is suddenly interested in US beef is because their suppliers in Brazil are now embroiled in a massive corruption scandal that seems to involve much of the Brazilian government. The scandal included bribing inspectors, shipping out diseased and contaminated beef and I don’t know what all else. The president of Brazil has been formally charged with corruption, allegedly taking $150,000 in bribes from the huge JBS meat processing company. China, like the US and most other countries, has banned imports of beef from Brazil until they get the situation straightened out down there.

“Pink Slime” Case Finally Over?

It seems that ABC has settled out of court with BPI in the slander case BPI brought against ABC for it’s stories about so-called “pink slime”, a heavily processed, treated meat substance made from scraps and trimmings, and then injected into hamburger. BPI was suing ABC for almost $2 billion. With damages and other penalties, ABC could have been on the hook for $5.7 billion if it lost the case.

ABC is claiming the stories “accurately presented the facts and views of knowledgeable people about this product”, while BPI claims it’s product is “safe, wholesome, and nutritious”.

What bugged me the most about the whole thing wasn’t the “pink slime” itself. I’ve eaten raw eel, lutefisk and cheese that smells so bad it wouldn’t be allowed in a landfill. What bothered me about it was no one told me this stuff was in the hamburger in the first place.

I’m not a fan of ethanol. It makes no sense at all. At least not the way we’re doing it. If you look at the entire production cycle of ethanol production and it’s overall effects, one could argue that producing ethanol is actually worse for the environment than producing the equivalent amount of energy in traditional fossil fuel. If you trace back all of the energy inputs into the system, the things like transportation costs, fertilizer costs, herbicide costs, the energy used to plant, grow and harvest the crops, it quickly becomes apparent that ethanol, as a “green” fuel, isn’t all that much better than gasoline. Yes, it produces less carbon and pollution when it’s burned, but that is just looking at the end product and its use, and is ignoring everything else that goes into actually making the stuff. When everything is added in, the adverse environmental effects of ethanol production and use is almost as bad as fossil fuels, and according to some studies, actually worse. Go look it up. You got Google. If you ignore the industry funded fluff and nonsense studies and look at the truly independent research, you’ll quickly find that the whole ethanol system is far from being environmentally friendly.

Then there is the economics of the whole industry. Without massive government subsidies, tax breaks, usage mandates, and other taxpayer funded subsidies, i.e. “corporate welfare”, the whole system would fall apart like the house of cards in an earthquake.

Disconnected from Reality?

That’s what I suspect a lot of “experts” are when it comes to milk prices, disconnected from reality. While various experts are claiming milk prices will be pushing $18/cwt “real soon now”, things out in the real world are considerably different. The market has actually been trending down for a while now, with prices on the commodities market falling on the futures market.

Of course the futures market isn’t what farmers actually get paid for their products. What a product trades for and what the farmer is actually paid for the physical product often have no relationship to one another. As a lot of farmers found out when Grassland told them they were going to have to find a different place to sell their milk and some got offers as low as $6/cwt from some processing facilities.

Farming related news you might have missed, stuff I was curious about, commentary about this and that and all that kind of stuff

Amazon Wants to Buy Whole Foods

On Friday, June 16, it was announced that Amazon is looking to buy Whole Foods for almost $14 billion.

As far as WF is concerned, the company hasn’t been doing all that well. Sales have been flat or even declining and the company seems to have stagnated. Some of it’s major shareholders, particularly a hedge fund called Jana, have been putting heavy pressure on WF to sell itself off in the hopes (they say) of shaking up the company and improving sales and WF’s CEO says they only want to do because Jana would make massive profits. Both sides are correct. WF needs to be shaken up if it’s going to survive, and yes, Jana would make massive profits off the sale. If this goes through, Jana would see about a $300 million dollar profit.

Why does Amazon want an upscale grocery chain that caters to people with more money than brains? Amazon has been trying to get into the grocery business in a big way since at least 2008, and while it’s had some limited success, groceries haven’t worked all that well for the company. Buying WF would give it 430 brick and mortar grocery stores already in place along with the supporting infrastructure, access to WF’s supply chain, etc. It would also give Amazon 430 distribution points that already cater to upper middle class patrons, a very profitable class of consumer.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Cuba

Okay, why is Cuba popping up in a blog allegedly related to farming? Because we actually sell grain to Cuba, that’s why. Over the last eight months we sold 10 million bushel of corn to Cuba, and it could be a significant buyer of other agricultural products as well.

The current administration is rolling back the lifting of some of the restrictions on Cuba that the previous administration began. It is going to once again forbid travel to the country by individuals, institute new restrictions on trade, and basically try to roll things back to the way they were, despite the fact everyone knows the fifty year old Cuban embargo has done absolutely no good at all.

The thing I don’t understand about Cuba is this — Yes, Cuba is a communist country with a history of human rights abuses. But China is also a communist country with a history of human rights abuses that is, if anything, far worse than Cuba. So why do we have virtually unlimited trade and travel to and from China, but the half century old and totally ineffective embargo against Cuba is still in place?

Lead in Baby Food

A really scary story has been popping up all over the place reporting that FDA testing has found that a large percentage of baby food is contaminated by lead. About 20% of the baby food tested by the FDA over the past ten years or so had lead in it.

The amounts were generally below what the FDA claims is “safe” but you have to remember that modern thinking is that no level of lead is safe for infants and children, and FDA standards for lead are many years out of date.

Even more troubling was that lead seemed to be more common in baby food than in adult versions of the same product. Overall 14% of the adult foods had lead, while 20% of baby foods had lead. Even more strange is that 25% of adult marketed apple juice contained lead while a whopping 55% of apple juice markets for babies contained lead. Makes you wonder what the hell is going on.

Dicamba. Again.

I’ve talked about the herbicide dicamba before and all of the problems associated with it, and the lawsuits going on against Monsanto. Let me recap things: Monsanto released a new GM line of seeds called Xtend that was resistant to dicamba as well as it’s RoundUp herbicide because weeds have developed resistance to RoundUp alone. But Monsanto began selling the seed before USDA and FDA had approved the new blend of herbicide that was intended to go along with the new seed. As a result a lot of farmers illegally used non-approved forms of dicamba, causing damage to hundreds of thousands of acres of crops from dicamba drifting into areas where it wasn’t supposed to go. Dicamba is extremely volatile, evaporate easily, and can drift long distances from where it is being applied unless great care is used. Even when the correct blend of herbicide is used and applied properly, it seems it can cause problems. Arkansas has outright banned Monsanto’s Xtendimax dicamba formulation and may ban all dicamba use under emergency regulations because there have already been almost 100 complaints from 14 different counties about misuse of the chemical

There are widespread reports coming from all over Arkansas about damage to crops because of dicamba use already this year, even when the product is being used exactly according to the instructions. There are indications that even when used with the proper equipment and when following the instructions, there dicamba is drifting over large distances, in some cases as much as a mile or more.

Addendum: Arkansas regulators had a meeting on June 20 to consider a complete ban on all in crop use of dicamba. The ban failed because “Due to a procedural error, the vote to consider a ban on in-crop use of dicamba by the Arkansas State Plant Board will be re-voted on at a later time.” So while Monsanto’s formulation was banned, BASF’s version of the herbicide is still legal to use for now.

Rain and More Rain

We’ve been getting extraordinary amounts of rain here over the last few weeks. It just doesn’t seem to want to stop. And as a result a lot of fields around here look like this:

Fields covered in mud, standing water, and corn starting to turn yellow from too much water. And, of course, there’s more predicted for late tonight and into tomorrow morning.

The entire state isn’t like this, though. Weather patterns have been spotty, with one area getting pounded by rain while just twenty miles away they get nothing. There was considerable damage the other day from a storm that rolled through the Appleton area, even a few suspected tornados, while here, 15 miles away, all we got was a bit of light rain.

Eating Habits Changing?

Is the “fat is evil” belief finally beginning to be laid to rest once and for all? Maybe? Consumption of butter is increasing world wide, sales of “low fat” dairy products are being replaced by “full fat” dairy products. (I put that “full fat” in quotes because it implies that the fat content of the milk is not tampered with. It is. Milk straight from the cow has a fat content that can run as high as 5 – 7% while the “whole” milk you get in the store is 3.25%.)

It isn’t just butter, either. For decades we were taught that eating fatty meat will kill us too, so the trend for many years was to trim all of the fat off of meat, to develop types of cattle and diets that resulted in very little visible fat in the meat, etc. That’s changing now as well it seems. Sales of fattier cuts of meat, bacon, well marbled cuts of beef have all been going up.

The whole “fat free” craze that finally seems to be laid to rest didn’t do us any good and may actually have done us a lot of harm. Especially when food processors resorted to loading up their products with salt, sugar and other crap to make it edible because removing the fat also removed the flavor from a lot of products.

Animal Welfare

Tyson is launching a very extensive system to monitor the welfare of the animals it raises/processes. It claims it is bringing in a third party monitoring company that will use a variety of techniques including video, data analysis and other techniques to make sure that the animals are treated well. While I am pleased they’re doing it and I hope the other big chicken processors do the same, you and I both know that the only reason they’re doing it is because of the public pressure being put on them because of the videos and information that’s been made public by the animal rights groups that have been exposing how badly many of these animals have been treated.

Milk Prices

Just a few weeks ago I saw people predicting milk would be in the mid to high $17/cwt range, with some claiming it would hit $18+. I was skeptic about that at the time because I didn’t see anything to indicate any factors that would push the prices up that much. In fact, we have an enormous surplus of milk on our hands with milk processors actually shutting off dairy farms supplying them milk because they can’t deal with the glut of product coming in. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and a couple of other states have had incidents of milk processors cutting off dairy farms, forcing them to desperately try to find someone, somewhere, to buy their milk.

The reason why is simple – too much milk. And production continues to increase. This is going to keep up until there is a major shake up in the industry and dairy farms start to go bankrupt. That seems to be the only thing that will stop this never ending expansion of production.

No Rush On NAFTA

A few weeks ago Sonny Perdue, the ag secretary, was claiming that the administration would re-do NAFTA in just a couple of weeks, illustrating that neither he nor the administration knows anything about how treaties, trade deals or negotiations really work. But apparently someone, somewhere, in the administration does know, and it looks like talks and negotiations will extend well into 2018, a bit more of a rational time frame. Frankly, considering how utterly inept this administration has been in its dealings with other countries, we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up with the administration giving Texas back to Mexico and selling the U.P. to Canada.

Rain, Rain and More Rain

That’s the story around my local area. We had almost three inches of rain Wednesday night. We had two and a half inches last night, when added up with the rain we’ve received over the past week or so we’ve had between 7 – 9 inches of rain over the past week. The ground is saturated, fields have standing water, corn in low lying areas is turning yellow, and anyone trying to get out in the fields around here is pretty much completely shut down if things don’t start to dry out.

My backyard is so saturated with water that the ground makes squishing noises when you walk over the grass, and in the low part of the yard near the property line we have about eight or ten frogs that have moved in. I like frogs, great little critters. But it’s them starting to think that my backyard is a swamp that’s a bit troubling…

The SNAP (food stamp) program has been in the cross hairs of certain parties for ages now. They haven’t been able to entirely eliminate the program because it would generate an enormous amount of public outrage. So they go after it with what I call “Death From A Thousand Cuts” (DFATC). DFATC works by going after a program by deliberately instituting rules and requirements that make it so difficult to apply for and get benefits that people just give up and don’t even try. Of course that’s not how the administration presents these changes. The changes are presented as being “reasonable”, cutting fraud, or even somehow “helping” the recipients.

The latest one to be proposed for SNAP is that the administration now wants to charge retailers fees for being able to accept SNAP that range anywhere from $250 – $200,000 depending on the size of the retailer. The amount would range from $250 for small retailers, up to $200,000 for large retail chains like Walmart. It doesn’t sound like much, but small retailers are already financially stressed, and this would just add even more to their cost of doing business. A lot of them are going to think it isn’t worth the extra cost and paperwork involved and will just drop participation in the SNAP program.

Be Careful What You Ask For

People in the ag industry are getting a wee bit nervous as the date for the administration to “renegotiate” the NAFTA agreement approaches. Mexico is a huge market for US agricultural products, and the administration’s near constant use of Mexico and Mexican immigrants as scapegoats hasn’t been doing much to make Mexico willing to cooperate with us. As the article linked to above says, “Farmers are hoping NAFTA can be updated without blowing up the trade agreement.”

Considering this administration is spending almost all it’s time trying to do damage control as one scandal after another hits the media, and that it it doesn’t seem to understand what NAFTA actually is, doesn’t seem to understand how it works, and doesn’t even seem to understand how trade agreements work, and that it regularly uses one of our NAFTA partners as a scapegoat, calling the people of that country rapists, drug dealers and “bad people”… Well, let’s just say this has the potential of blowing up in everyones faces.

The biggest issue for the US dairy industry is Canada. Canada has a dairy marketing system that actually works relatively well. Granted, a lot of people up there don’t like it, but it has kept Canadian prices fairly stable, kept dairy farmers reasonably profitable, and it has avoided the boom/bust cycle that the dairy industry in the rest of the world has been following for decades now. The US dairy industry would like to see that system totally destroyed, it seems, and force Canada into the same chaos we’re enduring down here.

Don’t get me wrong, the Canadian system has a lot of problems, but you have to admit that the system has kept Canadian dairy farmers largely insulated from the insanity going on in the rest of the world where, it seems, the business model is that if the market is flooded with way, way too much milk, the solution is to produce even more milk.

China to Import US Beef

Back in 2003 China banned imports of US beef because of incidents of Mad Cow Disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE). Although the ban was eventually lifted fairly quickly, China shifted it’s imports to Australia and South America, and the US has exported pretty much no beef at all to China. That looks like it will be changing. China’s imports of beef have expanded massively in the last five years, going from $275 million in 2012 to $2.5 billion in 2016. Needless to say the US beef industry would dearly love to get a piece of that market.

Wally Melons?

For decades we’ve been putting up with fruits and vegetables that pretty much don’t taste like fruits and vegetables. Those California strawberries may look beautiful, but they don’t actually taste much like strawberries. Or pears that are so rock hard you have to boil the bloody things to make them edible. And don’t get me started on whatever the hell it is supermarkets sell as “tomatoes”. I don’t know what those things are. They look like tomatoes, but they have the flavor and texture of drywall. Well, I’ve never actually eaten drywall. I mean that would be silly. But I suspect that if I ever did eat drywall, it would have that… Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, melons.

Apparently Walmart’s melons are so bad that even Walmart hates them, and they’ve apparently done something about it. They’ve come up with their own variety of melon.

Wally world apparently worked with Bayer to develop… I was going to make a joke about an aspirin flavored melon, but that would be in bad taste, wouldn’t it… Develop a melon that can handle the stresses of shipping long distances, but still somehow manages to taste like something reasonably close to an actual melon.

It is not genetically modified, but was specifically bred just to satisfy Walmart’s specifications. Is it any good? I have no idea, and I’m not about to try one of the things.

Weather Worries Push Prices Up

Weather concerns in the US have been slowly pushing grain futures prices up on the commodities market. Hard red spring wheat, used for bread, has been hurt by dry conditions in large parts of the US grain belt. And while there is rain in the forecasts, it’s felt that much of the crop is too far along for rain to help much at this point. One of the concerns is the protein content of the wheat. They want a protein content of at least 10.2% and it looks like large amounts of the crop is going to be coming under that level. Hard red spring wheat hit $6.45 at one point, the highest it’s been since 2014, before going to 6.41. From what I’ve seen they’re claiming the spring wheat crop is the worst it’s been in almost 30 years.

Weather concerns have the markets a bit nervous right now as the climate can’t seem to figure out what it wants to do. Here in my part of Wisconsin we’ve been abnormally wet. In other parts of the grain belt it’s been abnormally dry, with parts of the Dakotas going through drought. Corn finally has been seeing some significant movement in prices, pushing up to 3.83 as of this morning.

Mergers and still more Mergers

It seems that every ag company is trying to buy every other ag company these day. The Bayer/Monsanto merger is still in the works, with Bayer trying to sell off bits and pieces of itself so it can claim that its takeover of Monsanto won’t reduce competition. Of course it won’t. (I wish there was a “sarcasm” font, don’t you?) Of course it will reduce competition. That’s the whole point behind these mergers, to get rid of competition and increase the market share and profits of the new company that emerges after they have merged.

Anyway, Bayer is trying to sell off it’s Libertylink genetic modification trait, it’s glufosinate weed killer, and maybe it’s garlic and pepper seed operations and some other bits and pieces it hopes will satisfy regulators. BASF and Syngenta are supposed to be interested.

Meanwhile Syngenta itself is the target of a takeover. It’s being bought by China National Chemical Co, owned by the Chinese government. DuPont is selling parts of itself off in order to try to merge with Dow Chemical.

Will any of these mergers and buyouts actually help farmers as the companies claim? Of course not. The only people who ever benefit from these mergers are the lawyers, corporate executives who cash in big time on bonuses and stock deals, and a handful of investors.

Glyphosate Study Craziness

Glyphosate, commonly known as RoundUp(TM), was ruled to be a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization, despite the fact that it has been throughly studied for decades by dozens of organizations and scientists and they’ve found no real link between the herbicide and cancer. Even the European food Safety Authority, one of the most cautious and paranoid out there, didn’t find a link.

But WHO and IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer which is part of WHO, came to the conclusion that it was “probable”. Why?

So why wasn’t that study included? Did Blair not know about it? Well, he did know about it. It was his study. He knew that if the study was included glyphosate would ruled to be not a carcinogen. He admitted that is a sworn deposition, as well as admitting that if that data had been included IARC’s analysis would have been significantly altered.

So why did a scientist deliberately withhold the results of his own study from IARC’s analysis? Because it hadn’t been published yet, he said. And that it wasn’t published yet because it was “too big” to put in a single paper, he claimed.

Conagra is selling it’s Wesson brand of oils to Smucker for about $285 million. Conagra has been going through a reorganization since 2015. Wesson is just the latest part of the business to go on the auction block. The company is trying to change it’s business from selling low profit staples and cheap processed food to producing higher end and higher profit items with fresh(er) ingredients including salsas, organic pot pies and speciality pork and chicken products.

Conagra has sold off it’s private label operations which made products like soups, cookies and other foods that supermarkets sold under their own brand name. The company bought that business in 2012 for $5 billion, never made a decent profit at it, and sold it off in 2015 for half the original purchase price. It even sold of Lamb Weston, the company that’s the french fry supplier to McDonalds and other restaurants. That didn’t make a lot of sense to be because Lamb Weston had had sales of $3 billion and was pretty profitable.

The Wesson brand has been around for more than 100 years. It was originally started by David Wesson in 1899, a chemist who invented a way to refine cottonseed oil to remove bad taste and smell from it so it could be used as a cooking oil.

The acquisition by Smucker is a bit troubling because it already owns Crisco shortening and oils so it’s certainly going to reduce competition in the market. I’ve heard that both products are going to be made at it’s processing facility in Ohio, so basically Wesson oil and Crisco oil are going to be exactly the same product with different labels. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Crisco oil brand (not the shortening) disappears entirely.

Syngenta Lawsuit Goes Forward

Back in 2012 Syngenta released a new GM variety of corn and promoted it heavily. farmers planted it, only to find that they couldn’t sell it to China. The Chinese government had not yet approved that variety of corn for import, and rejected all shipments that were contaminated with it, costing the farmers a lot of money. Grain exporter ADM is also suing Syngenta in a separate suit, as is Cargil.

The claim against Syngenta is that the company knew it’s new corn was not approved for import into China, and was deliberately misrepresenting the approval status of the corn when it was marketing it to farmers so they went ahead and used it. There are other lawsuits going on with more than 350,000 corn growers involved in individual or class action lawsuits against the company, with potential damages hitting $13 billion.

Making things even more interesting is that the China National Chemical Corp, owned by the Chinese government, is in the process of trying to buy Syngenta. So if Syngenta loses, China, which rejected Syngenta corn originally, will own the company.

The church/school bake sale is something of a tradition around here. Parents bake up all kinds of goodies and sell them at events to raise money for churches, schools, kids groups, etc. It’s also probably illegal here in Wisconsin. Or at least it was until the ban was overturned recently.

Wisconsin law states that bakery for commercial sale must be produced in a licensed, fully inspected commercial kitchen by staff that are properly licensed. While the state generally has ignored things like school/church bake sales for fund raising, it’s a different story if you try to sell your goodies at farmers’ markets and other places.

Until now. A judge overturned that law, and I’m not really sure if that’s a good thing or not.

While I have some sympathy for the women who were cited for selling their baked goods, there are valid reasons why these rules are in place, and the biggest is food safety. I’m a stickler for food safety for a couple of reasons.

First because I’ve worked in the food service business, and Mrs. GF is still involved in it, and both of us know how incredibly easy it is for food to become contaminated and cause someone to become very, very sick indeed.

Second, because I’ve been one of those sick people. I was already nearly unconscious, suffering from explosive diarrhea, severe dehydration and I don’t know what all else when the paramedics carted me out of work on a stretcher and rushed me to the ER where I spent the night with multiple IVs hooked to me and wired up like a Christmas tree.

While I’m sure these women feel the state requirements are unnecessary, they are there for a reason. And I should point out that one of the reasons they are there is to protect them. If one of their products makes someone sick, don’t they realize that they are liable, especially if it can be proven that they were making products in a relatively uncontrolled environment like a home kitchen? They could end up being sued and losing everything they own.

Milk Mess

If you look at some of the data being published in the press about the dairy industry, the markets now actually look pretty good. Sort of. In some parts of the world, at least, the dairy markets seem to be improving considerably, especially down in New Zealand. Prices are going up, in some cases significantly, improving the financial picture for farmers. Butter prices are strong and getting better, even the powdered milk market, which had been hit very hard by China’s cutbacks in dairy imports, is doing better. Milk production in the EU continues to drop, showing a decrease of about 2% or more.

But if you take a closer look at the entire picture, there are some troubling indications. Most of this positive data is coming from GlobalDairyTrade, a trade organization which pretends it is a free market in Australia and New Zealand, but really isn’t. It’s actually owned by Fonterra, the huge dairy co-op, and it sells only Fonterra milk products, so the data coming from it is skewed to begin with. And Fonterra has deliberately manipulated the market in the past by increasing or decreasing the amount of product flowing through GDT. So any time I see anyone taking GDT data seriously I wince a bit because not only are GDT prices easily manipulated, but it also deals with a fairly limited market, China and south east Asia, and a fairly limited supply source. A huge market, true, and a significant one. But dairy is a global business and is influenced by a lot more than just China.

The biggest problem right now seems to be US production which continues to go up despite a glut of milk on the market. Speculation that milk prices are going to improve significantly are pushing a lot of mega-farms to add more production, and new mega-farms are in the works. Here in Wisconsin Grassland, the company that infamously stopped taking milk from some 75 farmers here in the state because they claimed new Canadian trade rules cost them sales, is working to build it’s own, 5,000 cow dairy farm.

UW ag economist Cropps says milk prices could go over $17, maybe even hit $18 by the fall of this year, despite the fact US production could be going up by as much as 4%. But that’s based on the belief that China is going to significantly increase milk imports, that EU milk production is going to continue to decline, and production in New Zealand is going to remain flat or even go down a bit.

Changes Oh My

Well, this is going to take a while to get used to. For the first time in like forever, I’m unemployed. Deliberately unemployed. I submitted my resignation at work and I am retiring. Sort of. I won’t be filing for social security for another four years or so, but we planned for this and the finances are already worked out for this situation and active. But it still makes me nervous, anxious.

Granted, I wasn’t exactly working my tail off the last couple of years. I’d dropped back to part time and actually was only dealing with special events at the theater and filling in when one of the day crew was out or we had an emergency to deal with.

Still, it’s a strange feeling, not having a job to worry about.

Fat Saves Dairy Industry?

That’s what it is starting to look like. About the only bright spot in the dairy industry right now seems to be butter and, to a lesser extent, cheese. Butter sales are up dramatically, largely because the fact that eating dairy fats isn’t going to kill you (at least not any quicker than anything else) is finally starting to filter out into the mainstream.

One of these days I’m going to do an article about food and health, and all of the BS we’ve been told over the years. The amount of pure bullshit that we’ve been fed over the decades is mind boggling. From “healthy” hydrogenated plant fats in margarines and shortenings that were supposed to be “good” for us turning out to be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, to coffee still being demonized despite the fact it seems to help reduce incidences of some cancers and may help prevent some kinds of dementia, to “juice cleanses” that don’t cleanse anything, to the multi-billion dollar “supplement” industry that is selling us little more than snake oil…

Infrastructure Plan? What Infrastructure Plan?

There’s been a lot of press about the administrations “$1 trillion” plan to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and everyone is going “Oh, goodie, isn’t that wonderful!”

But… Well, sorry, but there pretty much isn’t an infrastructure plan. Seriously. Oh, they’re talking a lot about it but no one is actually doing anything about it because talk is free and bridges cost money, so where’s the cash? There isn’t any. The administration can talk all it likes, but the administration doesn’t hand out the money, Congress does. Congress, not the administration, develops the plan, finds the money for it, etc, not the office of the president. And there is little or no work going on in Congress to do anything pertaining to the administration’s plans.

And some of the things the administration has been talking about are more than a little troubling, especially this “private partnership” thing. Why? Because in most cases these “private partnership” deals end up with things worse than they were before.

There is a reason why we don’t have a lot of toll roads and bridges in this country. It’s because we tried it before, going back 200 years or more, and it was a nightmare. Outrageous tolls, violence, unsafe bridges and roads, no investments in improving the system… One of the reasons we adopted a publicly funded, government owned highway and bridge system in this country in the first place was because the private operators so horribly abused the public, gouged them so badly on prices, that the government had to step in because the private model was destroying the transportation system in the country.

The problem with history is that no one seems to actually remember it.

As for this particular infrastructure plan, well, there isn’t one, as I said. Most of the things the administration is talking about like federal grants to local jurisdictions and all of that? That’s going on right now, for heaven’s sake. The federal government almost never directly funds highways and bridges, it does it through a system of low cost loans, grants, etc. Which is what the administration is claiming is its “new” plan. Oh, please…

And let’s face it, most of the problems we’re facing when it comes to the infrastructure system are our own fault because we don’t want to pay for it. Or, rather, the politicians we elect don’t want to because in order to actually pay for maintenance and new construction and all the rest they might have to raise taxes a few cents and that would make the corporations and lobbyists who bribe thembuy their souls [ahem, sorry about that, funny how those typos slip in there] make nice contributions to their campaigns so they can continue the democratic process, a wee bit upset.

But here’s the thing, you are going to pay for it. One way or another. If we don’t pay for it through taxes, we’re going to pay through the nose for it in tolls or user fees. Someone has to pay the bill. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

4:30 AM? Really???

Not farm related but… This is the third day in a row all three of those stupid cats have been sitting outside the bedroom door yelling at us at 4:30 in the morning. And I come stumbling out of the bedroom in dim light of dawn and stumble over their food dish because they have now gotten into the habit of moving their food dish right in front of the freaking door during the night. How do they even do that? They don’t even have hands much less thumbs and fingers so how do they move a dish half full of kibble all the way across the floor and plant it right in front of the bedroom door???

Oh, very funny, cats. Ha freakin Ha… Good joke. Now stop it!

I don’t know what the world is coming to — cats pulling practical jokes on people…

Just wait, guys. I’m going to find where you’re hiding during the day to take your little 9 hour naps and see how you like being woken up out of a sound sleep…

Some of you are probably getting tired of me talking about the dairy industry and the

Cow is angry.

problems it faces, but I ran across an editorial over at Wisconsin Agriculturalist that was really well written and well thought out that talks about the situation the dairy industry is facing. Go give it a look if you have a few minutes.

The writer brings up a lot of points that I’ve talked about myself, or have at least thought about. I wanted to pass some of that along with my own thoughts on the subject. So if you’re sick of me babbling about dairy farming, feel free to skip this one. I won’t blame you at all if you do.

As the author points out, blaming Canada for our overproduction problems down here is just plain stupid. He doesn’t use that word. He’s more polite than I am.

Blaming Canada for our problems and Grassland cutting off some 75 or so farmers from a market for their milk is stupid. Demanding that the government “do something” to change Canada’s milk production and marketing system because of our problems down here is sort of like a kid demanding his parents take away his friend’s Playstation because he doesn’t have one himself.

Canada has a milk production/marketing system that works fairly well. Dairy farmers enjoy relatively stable prices that let them make a reasonable profit. But the price they pay for this is that their production is strictly limited. They have a system in place that permits them to only produce a specific amount of milk. If they want to expand their operation, the only way they can do it is by acquiring the quota of a different farm that is shrinking or going out of business.

This also means that Canada has to put in place import restrictions that prevent outsiders from dumping their surplus product onto Canadian markets at cut-throat prices and destabilizing their whole system.

This, some claim, is “unfair”. Canada, they claim, should simply allow the US to dump it’s surpluses on the Canadian markets so the US can continue to ramp up milk production to make even more product that no one wants and wrecking the Canadian dairy industry just as badly as we’ve wrecked the US markets.

They want a “free market”. But only a market that’s “free” for them, and not for anyone else, it seems. They want a market where they are free to dump their excess on everyone else, but at the same time they want the US to protect them from other countries doing the same thing to us. Hence all of the rhetoric coming out of DC about tariffs on imports, claims that China and Mexican products are “destabilizing” our markets by dumping cheap products on us.

But we should be able to do it to them?

Could the government here ever develop a marketing system that actually works? Sure it could. But it won’t. It can’t.

The problem is that the government is no longer in the hands of elected leaders who represent us. Instead politicians have sold their souls (and ours) for the almighty dollar. Their actions are being influenced not by the voters who elect them, but by a handful of well financed special interest groups that are largely funded by a tiny handful of wealthy individuals and corporations and which pump hundreds of millions of dollars into election campaigns.

The author of the editorial wants farmers to join up with one marketing board or farmers’ organization or other to try to work with the government to get changes made. It’s highly unlikely that will work. It certainly hasn’t worked in the past. Farmers’ organizations attempting to change the system have come and gone by the dozens, and almost none of them have had any real positive influence on things. In some cases, they’ve made things worse.

What’s the solution? The government isn’t going to be any help. That system is largely broken. The government no longer responds to the needs of the people it’s supposed to represent, but only responds to those who can write out six figure checks or own a high priced and well funded lobbyist in DC.

I read this item over at Agweb twice and I still don’t understand why she thinks there’s a 70% chance corn could go over $4.40. She doesn’t give any data to actually back up that statement in the article. I hate items like this where some “expert” comes along and makes a specific statement, and then the report doesn’t give any reason why.

As of right now I don’t see any indication corn is going to go that high barring some kind of significant weather event or similar wide spread problem. We have massive amounts of corn still in storage from last year’s harvest, planned corn plantings for this year are down only slightly from last year… There basically is no pressure at all on the market to move the price up significantly.

At the moment, China has drastically cut back imports of corn to try to draw down it’s own stocks, and has increased production. There seems to be no increased demand for US corn anywhere, really. Ethanol production is relatively flat, we have grain storage facilities full to bursting with last year’s crop, weather has been relatively good… There doesn’t seem to be any reason for corn to go up almost $1 a bushel over the next few months. So why does she think it’s going to go up? Don’t know.